International Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Administration - Vol. 2

persing," the middle classes. Contractarian and liberal
apologists for economic rationalism may argue that social
equality is a contestable policy norm, but such defenses
have tended to lose momentum in the face of increasing
evidence that these public policies have also caused increasing unemployment, a decline in the dignity and security of work, environmental degradation, and, rather more
indirectly, urban decay, rising crime, alienation, and drug
dependency, and new forms of patriarchy. Communitarian
critics of economic rationalism ( Sandel 1984, Etzioni 1994) in North America now have much in common with
Continental social-theoretical arguments ( Habermas 1975,
1984, 1987) that economic rationalist policies are inimical
to identity, reciprocal obligation, social cohesion, and
good government and, further, that they also undermine
the social constructions of both time and trust necessary
for the reproduction of society and for continuing productive economic development.

ECONOMIC WARFARE. The imposition by a
nation or alliance in a conflict of a range of economic
and military activities designed either to reduce the
opponent's capacity to wage and sustain war, or to
preserve a capacity to prevail in the conflict, or both.
More narrowly, it is the aggressive use of the means of
production and trade to achieve national objectives. It is
an odd phrase in that war is itself an economic activity.
When Norman Angell published his The War of Illusions
( 1910) just before the onslaught of World War I, he was
doing no more than pointing out that the economic
consequences of a European general war would be so
catastrophic as to render it an irrational act for any leader
to contemplate. The only mistake in his analysis was the
assumption that leaders behave rationally and would
therefore avoid such a conflict at all costs. More generally,
economic warfare has a variety of levels of intensity,
ranging from freezing an enemy's assets and confiscating
its property during a formally declared war to using secret
methods to destabilize an opponent's economy during a
cold war.

Economic warfare is a term of relatively recent
coinage; the establishment during World War II of the
British Ministry of Economic Warfare helped to legitimize
the term. In reality, all wars have an economic component.
This is evident in the earliest theories of air power. The
whole point of delivering munitions from the air on
enemy territory was to deplete the war-making potential of
the opposing ground and naval forces. When the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, said, "The bomber will
always get through," he was demonstrating the vulnerability to attack of armaments factories, supply lines, and other
elements of military capability and its supporting structures as decisive factors in a major war. For much of World
War II, the rationale for bombing German cities was that
large concentrations of people coincided with economic
activity. Damage that, it was argued, and the war effort of
the adversary must suffer. Conversely, not attacking such
economic centers-perhaps out of respect for the Thomist
Just War tradition that holds that civilians must be left free
from military dangers-was self-defeating in modern warfare.

Much of the economic result of aerial bombing was
disappointing, from the perspective of all belligerents in World War II. Machine tools for such vital components as
ball bearings, for example, were found to be almost indestructible. All that was necessary after an air raid was to create temporary shelter and rig a generator, and production
could begin again with relatively little delay. German pro-

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